Bloggers Find Ian White’s Urban Mapping

Doug Caverly (WebProNews) gloms onto Greg Sterling’s (Search Engine Journal) article about Ian White and his company Urban Mapping. We at Directions know Ian well since he’s presented at our conference in past years (plug: Call for Papers is open!). Ian attacks the problem of mapping with an eye to the practical: how can we make the system smarter so it can better get us humans better information?

Sterling highlights Ian’s pet problem: the centroid problem.

Among the issues we discussed, White and I spoke for some time about what he called “the centroid problem.” This is a term I’d never heard but apparently refers to search results and listings being arrayed according to proximity from some hypothetical center of town. White argued that this is how an engineer might think about local but it’s not the way that users think. I agree that this approach renders “distance” a virtually meaningless filter.

Caverly sees Urban Mapping bumping into Google and other local search players.

And so, even if it’s not a competitor [to Google], it seems possible that Urban Mapping could bump into Google - or any number of other companies - at some point. A statement on its site makes this even more likely: Urban Mapping claims to “value intellectual creativity and agility over any particular body of knowledge,” and “our passion lies between disciplines and across domains.”